Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IRU) units), to service the incoming contacts. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment that the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are customer-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Normally in present-day ACDs when the ACD system's controller detects that an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling skills of the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority skill. Generally, the only condition that results in a contact not being delivered to an available agent is that there are no contacts waiting to be handled.
In contact centers, video-capable multi-media contacts are becoming more frequent. Packet-switched protocols now permit users to inexpensively acquire and use equipment providing real-time or full motion video images of themselves to other parties. The equipment is normally a video card, a digital camera or camcorder, and open source software.
Despite the advent of video telecommunications, many contact centers are continuing to route contacts to agents using non-video specific criteria, such as customer identity, customer value, wait time, agent availability, agent skills, and the like. The additional information provided by the video channel of the contact is largely ignored.